ANY reference to a man of law drawing his gun would naturally bring to your mind’s eye a western from Hollywood’s golden era ... a Gary Cooper or a John Wayne pulling out his six-shooter in the face of an outlaw.
But what happened recently in the town of Melun, less than an hour’s drive away from Paris, was a slightly different affair to say the least. Joseph Scipilliti, a 63-year-old lawyer, walked calmly up the staircase of the Melun high court building and entered the office of Henrique Vannier, another advocate, engrossed in his files concerning a case that involved Scipilliti.
Scipilliti drew out an automatic revolver from under his lawyer’s black robe and fired all the shots, save one. Then he turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger, releasing the final bullet into his own heart.
Despite serious injuries to his thorax, neck and shoulder by shots from a close range, Vannier who is some twenty years younger than his assailant and is physically a stout fellow, survived though he is still under strict medical surveillance in the Melun hospital.
Scipilliti died on the spot.
Justice Minister Christiane Taubira promptly intervened: “I learnt of this aggression with a terribly frightful feeling that our courts of law are now becoming dangerous places for those who work there.”
The media, in a quest slightly more serious than the justice minister’s remark, came up with many an explanation for Scipilliti’s unprecedented and puzzling, though tragic, act. These include a myriad of details about his being a drug addict, a sadist, a depressive maniac and even the secret member of an ultra-right terrorist group.
Another advocate, a close friend of the deceased, explained to a journalist: “Of late, Scipilliti always walked with his head down and only replied after being addressed a number of times.”
Though it does not answer all the questions, Scipilliti’s own entry into his private journal sent through the internet shortly before his move to all the lawyers and other people he knew, provides an indication that he had minutely planned and had decided to go ahead with his rival’s execution.
He writes: “Henrique Vannier incarnates in himself all the ills that I have been combating since the beginning of my career as lawyer. A simple suicide would lead to nothing so I have decided to do something else, something more meaningful. In order to make people react with their conscience to what I am going to do, I need to make some big noise. The French legal system is an imposture and is in a terrible mess today. Law has been abandoned and judges and advocates neither have usefulness nor power anymore.”
His belonging to a terrorist group can easily be dismissed as an effort by the pop media to bring an element of dreadful suspense into the story, but there are other details in Scipilliti’s message that point clearly toward his depressiveness, though they shed little light on his final act.
Among other anecdotes, for example, he writes about a reservation he had made to watch a Shakespeare stage play but had discovered on arrival at the theatre that there were no seats available. He blames this once again on lawlessness and on the decadence of the French society.
The degradation of the public’s moral values is indicated in another totally banal episode recounted with gratuitous details in Scipilliti’s internet message. It concerns his losing the key to his locker in the high court. He writes:
“It was freezing cold outside and I could not lay hands on my overcoat. So I walked all the way in my lawyer’s robe. Everyone looked back at me again and again as if I was an extraterrestrial. What happened to people’s sense of decency?”
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, November 15th, 2015
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